If “climates of hate” kill, then our words, even our thoughts, must be policed: Preemptive measures must be taken, Adults must be shamed, and Children must be indoctrinated in government schools

In case you missed it, a would-be terrorist was arrested last week for allegedly plotting a massive, multi-faceted attack on the White House

On the Liberty Unyielding website, Benny Huang proceeds to explain why exactly you may have missed that piece of news: The name of the "Georgia Man" turns out to be Hasher Jallel Taheb, and his motive — which we may never learn (sic) — appears to have been jihad.

Might this story have been a tad bigger if the alleged perpetrator hadn’t been a Muslim and “person of color?” Might it have been bigger yet if the sitting president had been a Democrat?


Of course it would have. …

The reason I pose these questions is not to point out blatant media bias, which is so glaring at this point that no one who wasn’t trying could possibly miss it, but to ask how the current “climate of hate” in this country contributed to this Taheb’s blood lust, and what we as a society are doing about it.

Because if I’ve learned anything from liberals, it’s that “climates” kill people.

Until fairly recently, I strenuously disagreed with this notion, and to some extent I still do. Climates, much like guns, do not kill people. People kill people. Blaming a climate lets the perpetrator off the hook because, when the killer’s agency is minimized, so too is his culpability. What else can a passive receptor of hate-filled messaging do except to kill the person whom he is told to despise?

The other reason I have resisted the idea of killer climates is that it seems to lead, like night into day, toward censorship. If climates kill, then our words, even our thoughts, must be policed. Preemptive measures must be taken. Children must be indoctrinated in government schools to prevent dangerous ideas from occurring in the first place. Adults must be shamed, doxxed, and fired from their jobs for fear of what other people completely unknown to the speaker might do upon hearing their words. I am on record saying that the blurring of distinctions between speech and violence is eroding our right to express ourselves, and I still believe that.

But in recent years, I have started to reevaluate my beliefs about killer climates. When a soak-the-rich socialist named James Hodgkinson attacked a group of Republican congressmen and staffers at a baseball practice in 2017, I couldn’t help but notice that he was feted by certain segments of the internet, most notably the Facebook groups we know he belonged to.

James Hodgkinson doesn’t strike me as a particularly bright individual, which tells me that he probably doesn’t do much of his own thinking. We know that he was a fan of Rachel Maddow, whose program appears on the network that pioneered the “24-hour hate” — a slightly elongated version of the “two minutes hate” that George Orwell spoke of — and it seems unlikely that his suggestible mind was not affected by it.

Which leads me to a very difficult position. Is snarky Rachel Maddow to blame for the shooting? What about Hodgkinson’s internet clique? If so, why aren’t they in jail next to him? If not, then why are we even talking about the inconsequential “climate” as a factor?

My answer to these questions threads a very small needle. Yes, Maddow and other vitriolic leftists are responsible. They are not however, equally responsible. Nor are they legally responsible; but they are morally responsible. They should tone it down a little. Of course, the law should not force them to tone it down, but if they want to be Menschen, they’ll do it of their own free will.

Naturally, I understand that I’m handing liberals a cudgel with which to beat me. They want to use extreme social pressure, and sometimes even the force of law, to smother voices they don’t like. They’ll applaud when I say that people who speak mere words are at least partially responsible for the violent deeds of others because it will justify their exploitation of tragedy as a silencing tactic.

This, of course, is the perpetual problem posed by dishonest brokers — and that is exactly what liberals are. We can’t have a mutual agreement that both sides will avoid rhetorical bomb-throwing because the other side will only exploit these ground rules to their benefit.

Why? Because when tragedy strikes, they see an opportunity to make policy gains. This often involves scapegoating whole classes of people and then demanding that they speak in chastened tones, if they must speak at all. It’s high-brow “shutuppery,” but shutuppery none the less.

For a good example of this, consider the JFK assassination. Though the man who struck down the president was an unequivocal communist, this fact was quickly swept aside for political reasons. Some denied that he was a communist while others denied that he was even the assassin.

But the most curious group of people are those who acknowledged Lee Harvey Oswald as both — but didn’t care. We can count the grieving widow Jackie Kennedy among this bunch. Upon learning that her husband’s assassin was a left-wing radical, she remarked: “He didn’t even have the satisfaction of being killed for civil rights. It had to be some silly little communist.”

Note the dismissive tone here: a “silly little” communist. Would she would have called her husband’s killer a “silly little” right-wing zealot if it had turned out to be a John Bircher? Doubtful. More important was Mrs. Kennedy’s apparent desire to see her late husband become a martyr for some cause other than the one he died for. It clearly bothered her that JFK was a victim of the Cold War, not the civil wrongs movement.

And she wasn’t alone. In short order, America’s elite decided how President Kennedy and his murder would be recalled in popular memory, then exploited it for political gain. Less than a week after the assassination, the new president, Lyndon Johnson, addressed Congress, saying: “No memorial oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy’s memory than the earliest possible passage of the civil rights bill for which he fought for so long.”

Johnson was referring to what would become the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a bill that is both oppressive to the human spirit and unconstitutional on so many counts that I sometimes lose track.

For more details, check out Benny Huang's thoughts on the question:
Is The Civil Rights Act of 1964 an affront to sovereignty, privacy, dignity, and property rights? And does it exist primarily to keep an army of litigators employed?

… To this day, people still blame Dallas’s allegedly nasty, reactionary climate for Kennedy’s murder. Authors Bill Minutaglio and Steven L. Davis even published a book for the assassination’s fiftieth anniversary called “Dallas 1963” about the “climate” in that city in the weeks and months leading up to November 22, as if it had anything to do with the actual murder.

If there was an actual patsy here, it was Dallas [and Texas], not Lee Oswald. Dallas was framed. All the people of Dallas did was to exercise their constitutionally protected rights to speak their minds about Kennedy and his policies; and for that were slandered, and continue to be slandered, as accessories to murder.

Of course, there are more examples beyond the JFK assassination to illustrate the point. …

I sometimes ask myself how any one group of people could be so utterly incompetent when it comes to assigning blame. How is it that liberals’ accusations of incitement to violence seem to contaminate the wrong people with such disturbing regularity? And then it occurs to me. They always blame the people they really want to be shamed and silenced, whether or not they are guilty of anything. Liberals don’t care how broadly blame is spread. They don’t even mind when blame is apportioned to the complete opposite target — blaming Christians for a Muslim terrorist attack, for example, or blaming John Birchers for a communist’s assassination plot.

This bad faith is why we can’t ever agree with liberals to brush up on our public civility. There can be no gentlemen’s agreement with a movement that lives and breathes on bad faith. All of this talk about watching civility in discourse is their polite way of telling us to shut up.

Walls work, and Democrats know it; in fact, they betray their cognizance of this fact every time they freak out over the very idea of a wall

In another episode of stupid “gothcha” journalism, the Washington Post recently reported that — despite what President Trump may have tweeted — Barack Obama does not have a ten-foot wall around his swanky D.C. home.

Unleashed (on the Liberty Unyielding website) at this point, Benny Huang goes on to add that

In one of the most pointless stories to appear lately in an increasingly pointless newspaper, the Post described Chez Obama’s security features while citing anonymous neighbors who said that there was no wall.

 … In an attempt to fact check the fact-checkers, the Daily Caller’s Benny Johnson dropped by the Obamas’ to find out the ground truth. What did he see?

Obama does not have one wall. He has many. He has barricades. He has armed guards entirely blocking the suburban road where he lives. Multiple cement and iron barricades block the road leading up to the Obama mansion. A Secret Service car and agent keep people from entering the stretch of road on both ends approximately 1,000 feet in both directions.

So I guess Obama’s “neighbors” are liars — if they aren’t figments of the reporter’s imagination.

What question that both the Washington Post and the Daily Caller failed to ask is why Obama would even want a wall. If I’ve learned anything about the Democrats it’s that they build bridges when other less enlightened people build walls. Why hasn’t [the lightworker] built a footpath straight into his living room? Surely there are needy people on the streets of D.C. who might need somewhere warm to stay for the night. Some of those people are probably veterans and some of those veterans were probably sent to war by none other than BHO.

 … But seriously, is there a competent adult alive who believes that a former president living in a densely populated urban area would not be protected by walls? Everyone knows that walls protect current and former presidents, though plenty of people, I’m sure, forgot this fact just long enough to sneer at Trump’s latest “lie.” After reading the Post’s coverage they shook their heads and said, “My goodness, Trump is such a liar,” when they knew darned well that that it was the Post that was lying.
As far as I can tell, Trump’s big lie was the word “around.” There is not one large wall surrounding the entire property. Instead there’s a patchwork of security measures that includes walls.

The point here is that the Obamas depend on walls to keep them safe. That’s because walls are pretty darned effective, and everyone knows it. It’s why the Chinese built one to keep out the Mongols, and why Hadrian had one built in northern England.

Democrats know that they work too. In fact, they betray their cognizance of this fact every time they freak out over the idea of a wall. If we had an effective barrier between us and the impoverished hordes of Latin America, the Democrats would have to appeal to actual Americans to get elected. They would not have the underclass they need to stay in power and drive an economy that works for them alone. Democrats have thoroughly pissed off moderate, middle class Americans on this issue and all they can do is pray that the demographic change they’ve planned for arrives before the backlash.

Democrats don’t want to stop the flow of illegal aliens, so we should probably stop considering their advice on how to stop it. They have an incentive to tell us that ineffective countermeasures are in fact effective, and that effective ones are not.

If the people pouring over our borders were self-sufficient, religious, conservative, white, anti-communist Poles, the Democrats might suddenly find some utility for a wall. But because it benefits them to have our country swamped with people who can’t care for themselves, they pretend that walls don’t work. Make no mistake about it: If walls were ineffective, the Democrats wouldn’t find them threatening.

Our once-again Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, recently declared a border wall to be “immoral, ineffective, and expensive.”

And I always thought that liberals liked things that are immoral, ineffective, and expensive. They like the war on poverty, don’t they? That one is now entering its 55th year with no end in sight. As of 2014, it had cost us about $22 trillion (inflation adjusted), and its effect on reducing the poverty rate had been negligible. Other expensive boondoggles they’ve championed include Amtrak and forced busing.

 … In reality, the wall is not expensive at all. It will pay for itself. Even if it ends up costing $21.6 billion, as the Department of Homeland Security estimates, it’s still a bargain. Doing nothing is costing us out the butt.

The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) estimates that illegal aliens and their citizen children cost federal and state governments about $135 billion per year. This estimate is likely a low-ball figure as it assumes only 12.5 million illegals in the country when there are likely many more.

One other reason that the $135 billion estimate is likely too low is that it doesn’t take into account the impact of illegal immigration on elections on policy. Simply put, the cost of big government liberalism is almost incalculable, and that’s what poor third world illegal aliens seem to want. Illegal aliens also warp the census data so that big, liberal states such as New York and California receive more representation in Congress than they are entitled to. They are literally stealing House seats from other states.

So no, a wall would not be expensive. It’s the most fiscally conservative idea anyone has had in a long time. The money that a wall would save us could be diverted to veterans services, education, infrastructure, paying down the debt, or it could simply be returned to the taxpayers who earned it.

Liberals call the wall “ineffective” because it isn’t foolproof. The classic argument against the effectiveness of the wall, which is always made in bad faith, is that people will just find a way to go over, under, around, or through any barrier. Again, this argument only seems to apply to walls that protect our country, not walls that protect their favorite ex-president. Those walls works just fine.

The logic of this argument is that determined people will defeat any security measures we try to throw in their way, so why even try? Let’s just make it easy for them. We will necessarily be making it easier for less determined people to succeed as well, but hey — there’s an odd fairness to that. While, we’re at it, let’s take the doors off of our houses, leave our keys in the ignition when we go into the store, and open all the jail cell doors because they aren’t really stopping the most clever and determined among us.

Yes, a certain number of determined illegal aliens would still find ways to criminally break into our country despite a wall. But how many? One percent of the current total that crosses our border? Two percent? Ten percent? A wall that stopped even half of illegal border crossings would be worth it. But liberals don’t want to stop half of them — or any of them.

The idea that a wall is “immoral” is almost too stupid to discuss. Liberals find the wall immoral for the same reason that they find anything else immoral — because it challenges their power. That’s the real reason and anyone who tells you differently is a liar.

Walls work and everyone knows it. The efficacy of walls was never in doubt until Democrats decided to bet the farm on illegal immigration changing the country so profoundly that their party could never lose. Then, suddenly, walls became supremely useless.

But they aren’t useless. If they were, Democrats wouldn’t shriek in terror at the sight of them. And they certainly wouldn’t shut down the government to prevent one from being built.

5 Reasons Why #MeToo Is Flawed and More Harmful than Helpful

It is extremely apparent that #MeToo is more harmful than helpful, 

writes Michael Walsh in the Daily Wire — in reference to the absence of any semblance of rationality to the discussion of sexual harassment and assault —

primarily for these 5 reasons:

1) #MeToo does not allow sexual assault allegations to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.

If we are going to get to the truth in a particular case, and if we are going to be fair to the accuser and the accused, we cannot look at the case as another plot point in an overall narrative. Brett Kavanaugh is not just The Man character accused of abusing The Woman character. These people are not archetypes. He is an individual person, and she is an individual person, and their situation is an individual situation which has absolutely no relation to Harvey Weinstein or Bill Cosby or any other famous pervert.

This week, I have heard several women say that they aren’t sure if Kavanaugh is guilty but they did know plenty of “those kinds of boys” growing up and they were aware of “those kinds of things” happening. But that is exactly the wrong way of looking at this. Kavanaugh is not a “kind,” and this thing that happened, if it did indeed happen (which I don’t think it did), is not a “kind,” either. We are dealing with specific people and specific circumstances.

The problem with the #MeToo movement is that it is a movement. And movements come with their own narratives and ideologies. But sexual assault is not an ideological phenomenon. It is a criminal act, and therefore it must be evaluated objectively and on its own terms.

2) #MeToo does not acknowledge the possibility that women lie.

As we have established, it is a problem when we start making movements and narratives out of our opposition to sexual assault. It is even more a problem in this case when you consider what the narrative is telling us: namely, that women don’t lie about these things.

“Believe women,” the #MeToo crusaders shout. But we shouldn’t believe women. We shouldn’t believe men. We should believe individual people, regardless of gender, if there are good and empirical reasons to believe them. All people lie — men and women both — so we cannot make any blanket assumptions about which gender is more likely to be telling the truth.

We are told that “women don’t lie about rape.” You may as well say men don’t rape. Just because most men would never rape doesn’t mean that any particular man accused of rape is innocent. Likewise, just because most women would never lie about rape doesn’t mean that any particular woman accusing a man of rape isn’t lying. This is a very obvious point that the #MeToo movement has intentionally obscured.

3) #MeToo equates very unequal kinds of sexual misdeeds.

#MeToo has taken all sorts of sexual improprieties and put them all on the same spectrum, and then bunched them close together on that spectrum. Now, if a woman says she is a victim of sexual assault, she could mean anything from forcible rape to awkward flirting. She could mean that a felony was committed, or she could mean that a coworker propositioned her. Flirting is called harassment and harassment is called assault. Molehills are made into mountains and mountains into molehills.

In reality, there is no spectrum connecting rape to untoward comments. There is a vast chasm separating the two categories. On one side of the chasm is criminal violence and on the other is behavior ranging from normal to merely inappropriate. #MeToo has tried to fill in the chasm and lump every infraction with every other kind of infraction. They are all mixed together like a stew and each separate allegation is then seen not as a separate allegation but as an element or ingredient in the stew.

4) #MeToo infantilizes women.

Feminists claim that they want to empower women, but feminists are always the ones treating women like fainting damsels. Now, because of #MeToo, we call a woman a "survivor" if she was sexually harassed when she worked as a Denny's waitress 12 years ago. Or we may call her a survivor if she survived rape. Obviously the word is appropriate in the latter context but completely absurd in the former. It makes women seem so emotionally helpless and fragile that any uncomfortable or awkward situation will lead to a lifetime of trauma.

Women are also infantilized by the insistence that it is "victim blaming" to call for personal accountability and responsibility. So if a college girl gets blackout drunk at a frat party, has sex with a blackout drunk frat boy, and later decides the encounter was rape, we are not allowed to point out the steps she might have taken to avoid the encounter in the first place. And if an actress, desperate for a film role, decides to go up to a Hollywood producer's hotel room, again we are not allowed to notice the part she willfully played in what transpired next. I'm not saying that these kinds of cases represent the majority of #MeToo stories, but they do represent a sizable chunk of them. And because of #MeToo, they're all mixed together and no distinction is drawn between them.

5) #MeToo is mass hysteria.

The #MeToo movement does not facilitate a thoughtful discussion about sexual assault. It impedes the discussion. Prohibits it. That's how hysteria always works. The hysterical mob demands your unthinking participation. It does not want to answer any questions or entertain any rational critiques. It is not interested in subtlety or nuance. You must jump on the Bandwagon of Outrage or be trampled underneath it.

In a word, #MeToo is about vengeance. It is about feminists evening the score with the dreaded patriarchy. It is not about truth, justice, fairness, or anything remotely along those lines.

And so it should be opposed.

 

After Displaying His Collaboration Credentials, Mitt Romney Is Urged by Liberals to Run for President

Barely had Mitt Romney penned an anti-Trump op-ed for the Washington Post than one Amy Davidson Sorkin writes a piece in The New Yorker almost begging the Utah Senator to make a run for the White House:

Romney Vs. Trump: If Utah's Senator Is Serious, He Should Be Running for President

Are Mitt Romney and other Trump critics in the G.O.P. going to fight for American values or engage in quixotic battles to teach the President better manners? 

Sigh…
(Update: Thanks for the Instalink, Stephen…)

As Jon Gabriel writes, Don’t Be a Flake, Mitt:

Romney should keep a tally in his day planner: Every criticism of Trump merits at least 25 criticisms of the braying donkeys trying to push socialism on America. If he’s unwilling to take the fight to the left, there’s no reason for anyone on the right to support him.

Adds Ed Driscoll:

See also: Romney’s 2012 campaign.

• Related: Comparing Mitt Romney to Adolf Hitler in 2012

• Democrats rising to the "Mantle of the Office":
Calling Republicans "Hitler" since… the 1940s (!)

• Back in 2012, Newsweek Columnist Likened a Republican candidate's wife (!)
— the "Insufferable" Ann Romney — to Hitler, Stalin (thanks to Ed Driscoll)
 

Singing La Marseillaise, a Yellow Vest Protester Marches Up the Middle of the Champs-Elysées

Singing La Marseillaise, a yellow vest protester marches up the middle of the Champs-Elysées, next to Marianne. (Update: Merci pour le lien Instapundit.)

In the meantime, my post on How Fake News Has Misrepresented the Yellow Vest Revolt in France has been fully updated, markedly expanded, and, in the process, thoroughly rewritten, for an in-depth piece in the January 2019 issue of the New English Review entitled THE TRUTH ABOUT FRANCE'S YELLOW VESTS.

The New English Review Presents an In-Depth Article on the Truth About France's Yellow Vests

Sporting an Egon Schiele painting, my post on How Fake News Has Misrepresented the Yellow Vest Revolt in France has been fully updated, markedly expanded, and, in the process, thoroughly rewritten, for an in-depth piece in the January 2019 issue of the New English Review entitled THE TRUTH ABOUT FRANCE'S YELLOW VESTS (merci pour le Instalink, Glenn Reynolds).

Private sector nondiscrimination laws are brutal, un-American, and unconstitutional; they are the weapons of bullies

Joanna Duka and Breanna Koski thought they lived in a free country

deadpans Benny Huang.

Silly girls.

The two Arizona small business owners make custom artwork for hire. They are also devout Christians. After hearing about nondiscrimination laws in other locales being used as weapons against people of faith, they began to realize how vulnerable they are. Their city, Phoenix, has a private sector nondiscrimination law covering “sexual orientation,” which is coded language for sexual conduct. Seeing that it was only a matter of time before the LGBT community decided to ambush them in the same way it did Colorado baker Jack Phillips, they decided to file suit against the city. The Arizona Supreme Court will hear their case in January.

As crazy as it sounds, violations of this law are punishable by hard time. That’s right — not making custom artwork for sham same-sex weddings is a crime so heinous that it can result in actual confinement. Every day that a violator persists in her violation carries a penalty of six months in prison.

I can just imagine these two ladies in a rough prison block filled with beefy, tattooed lesbians, who I am sure will be kind to them for what they have done for the “LGBT community.” The conversations would be comical. “What are you in for?” “Not making wedding invitations.” “No, seriously. All joking aside, what are you in for?”

The law in question runs roughshod over at least three provisions of the U.S. Constitution — free speech, free exercise of religion, and the prohibition on involuntary servitude — not to mention Arizona’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Come January, it ought to be eviscerated. Time will tell.

Duka and Koski seem to be hanging their hats on a free speech argument. For some reason, courts seem more sympathetic to those pleas, despite free speech and free exercise of religion having apparent equal footing in the Constitution. The women claim that they serve all customers but won’t use their talents to make artwork for all events.

Not that it matters to me. Their argument is sound, but a broader argument against all private sector nondiscrimination would be equally sound. Such laws are brutal, un-American, and unconstitutional.

Private sector nondiscrimination laws have an ugly history. No, there was never a time when they were “needed,” not even in the 1960s. Such laws were unconstitutional then, are now, and will be until such time as the Left repeals the amendments that they fervently despise.

Examples abound. …
  
 … I’ve always wondered what the point of these laws is, besides aggressive thought reform. If a person doesn’t want to live with, say, a Lithuanian-American, why would a Lithuanian-American want to live with someone who hates him? I’ve never received a satisfactory answer to that question.

 … Even Jack Phillips, the Colorado baker who won a Supreme Court case against homosexual bullies, isn’t immune from these kind of harassment lawsuits. Soon after his case was taken up, a transgender “woman” sued him for refusing to make a “gender transition” cake for his big revelation. In Phillips’s previous case, he was accused of discriminating because he willingly made wedding cakes for opposite-sex couples but not for same-sex couples. That’s blatant discrimination, right?

No. But even if it were, I wouldn’t care.

Phillips argued that he made cakes for all customers but not all occasions. But where is the parallel to transgenders? Was he willing to make cakes for “gender staying-the-same” parties but unwilling to make cakes for “gender transition parties?” This is insane.

 … Private sector nondiscrimination laws are anathema to our way of life. They do not enhance freedom in any sense of the word. They limit agency, property rights, and our constitutional protections. They are the weapons of bullies, and frankly, I don’t want bullies to have weapons. Tear them all down.

Joyeux Noël, mit einem Weihnachtsgeschenk — For a Christmas Gift for Conservatives, What Could Be Better than the Medienkritik Blog Back in Business?

Following the surprise tweet of America's Ambassador to Germany, Richard Grenell, regarding the Claas Relotius scandal with, of all things, a David's Medienkritik collage, the sister blog of No Pasarán, which had lain dormant for years on end, announces that, after 10 years in der vilterness, it is back in business — and richly welcome its return is.

David's Medienkritik adds that in

a nutshell, the Relotius lies and fabrications reflected exactly the American boogeyman that has been sold to Germans for years now. We even put together a list of these stereotypes in 2008 - THIS IS NOTHING NEW - and they are still current today if you simply replace the word "Bush" with Trump".
Stereotypes most favored by Spiegel staff include:

• Americans are overbearing war-mongers bent on global domination who falsely claim they are spreading democracy when they are just spreading McDonalds and trying to control more oil fields
• Americans are heartless purveyors of capitalism, neglect the poor, and reject social safety nets
• Americans are trying to spread their superficial bubble gum, Disney, Hollywood culture worldwide to the detriment of all indigenous peoples - including even the Germans
• Americans are xenophobic racists 
• Americans are blindly patriotic, flag waving, USA-chanting, mind-numbed robots 
• Americans are militaristic gun nuts - everyone outside New York and Washington is packing machine guns
• Americans are obese fast-food gluttons
• Americans are hyper-religious Bible-thumping zealots who reject European humanism
• Americans don't care about the rest of the world or the environment (if only they could be environmental champions like the Germans!)
• Every current and recent military conflict involving the United States = Vietnam = quagmire = defeat
• The death penalty - did we mention the death penalty?
• Guantanamo - can we still talk about Guantanamo???

In fact, the reason that Mr. Relotius was not caught sooner is because his absurd contortion of reality was NOT absurd to his editors - it was a precise reflection of the "ugly America" that they have constructed and come to demand in an effort to maximize profit and keep readers supplied with their regular fix of resentment.  

And to offer all the evidence you might ever need, Medienkritk provides a link to its complete Spiegel archive… 

Anne Flora de Negroni: When I paint, I Become No More than the Paintbrush on the Canvas

Besides being a big dog lover, Anne Flora de Negroni is a Parisian artist in the 17ème arrondissement who has been painting since the age of 13:

la peinture a toujours été un refuge pour moi, j’aime ce moment où je peins, où je ne suis que le pinceau sur la toile, les yeux qui regardent avec attention.

The Troubling Parallels Between Today and the Watergate Era: The media was determined to "reverse the verdict of the election by non-constitutional means"; Trump 2016? No, Nixon 1972

What if, in the 1970s, Richard Nixon had had access to a Twitter account?

I'm askin', because your eyes are likely to open wide in disbelief as you read the description of the Watergate "scandal" in Paul Johnson's History of the American People.

You probably have always thought that no matter how good a president Richard Milhous Nixon may have been in certain areas, nobody can deny (nobody, that is, but a zealous — and untrustworthy — Republican hard-liner) that he was a shady (or a "flawed") character who, in no uncertain way, failed in one area that truly mattered, as Tricky Dick obviously did something very wrong (and illegal) and he was therefore some kind of conflicted Shakespearean soul who brought the scandal upon himself.

All I can say is: Prepare to be disillusioned.
(Update: thanks for the Instapundit link, Ed.)

Indeed, as you read about a Republican president's travails in the 1970s, you are going to think you are reading about the valiant fight to bring down the equivalent of Adolf Hitler by the likes of… Jim Acosta, Nancy Pelosi, and — yes — Robert Mueller.

In fact, as you read below, you are likely to think that so many coincidences can't be accidental, that the author can only have been writing with Donald Trump's White House in mind. As it happens, Paul Johnson's History of the American People was first published in 1997, the year after Bill Clinton's reelection.

Plus ça change…

(When you're done reading the (lengthy) excerpt in the post below, don't forget to check out Nixon and Watergate: What Do the MSM and History Books Fail to Tell Us About the 1970s Scandal? Money shot Money quote: "The truest description of what occurred in 1974 is not that the independent media brought down a president of the United States. What occurred was that the left-leaning MSM brought down a Republican.")

Without further ado, let us return to what Paul Johnson calls

"Watergate and the Putsch Against the Executive"

 … In parts of the media, there was an inclination to deny the legitimacy of Nixon's presidency and to seek to reverse the verdict by non-constitutional means.  …  'Remember,' Nixon told his staff, 'the press is the enemy.  When news is concerned, nobody in the press is a friend.  They are all enemies.'  That was increasingly true. …

 … at the time it was the triumphant Nixon who seemed to be in control, and his success not only humiliated the media liberals but actually frightened them.    …    The aim was to use the power of the press and TV to reverse the electoral verdict of 1972 which was felt to be, in some metaphorical sense, illegitimate — rather as conservative Germans, in the 1920s, had regarded the entire Weimar regime as illegitimate, or Latin American army generals, in the 1960s and 1970s, regarded elected but radical governments as illegitimate.  The media in the 1970s, rather like the Hispanic generals, felt that they were in some deep but intuitive sense the repository of the honor and conscience of the nation and had a quasi-constitutional duty to assert it in times of crises, whatever the means or the consequences.

This view was given some spurious justification by what was coming to be called the 'Imperial presidency,'  That the power of the executive had been growing since Woodrow Wilson's times, with dips in the Twenties and again in the late Forties and Fifties, was undeniable.

 … Nixon's reciprocal hostility to the media and his unwillingness to trust them, even more pronounced than under LBJ, persuaded some editors that 'something was going on,' which fitted into their other critical assumptions on what they termed the 'Nixon regime.'  And of course something was going on.  The White House was a power center engaged in all kinds of activities which would not always bear scrutiny.  It necessarily engaged, in a wicked, actual world, in the realpolitik which was theoretically banned by an idealistic Constitution.

 … Bad habits had set in under FDR

 … Though Truman and Eisenhower, who hated underhand dealings, kept clear of clandestine activities by their staff and the CIA, as a rule, they were generally aware of them and considered that in dealing with Soviet Russia and other totalitarian terror regimes, they were unavoidable

 … Kennedy's chief regret was that he had not made his brother Bobby head of the CIA, to bring it under family control

 … Under Kennedy and Johnson, phone-tapping increased markedly.  So did 'bugging' and 'taping.'

 … Until the Nixon era, the media was extremely selective in the publicity it gave to presidential wrongdoing

 … The anti-Nixon campaign, especially in the Washington Post and the New York Times, was continual, venomous, unscrupulous, inventive, and sometimes unlawful.  This was to be expected, and though it lowered the standard of US journalism, it was something Nixon was prepared to put up with.  What was more serious, and a matter which could not be ignored, was the theft, purchase, or leaking of secret material to these two papers (and others) and its subsequent appearance in print.  Under the First Amendment, legislation designed to protect military security, such as the British Official Secrets Act, was generally thought to be unconstitutional.

 … The appearance of secret material in newspapers shot up in spectacular fashion after Nixon assumed the presidency.     …     It is not known how many US lives were lost as a result of these leaks, but the damage to US interests was in some cases considerable

'Pentagon papers'

 … The administration discovered that publication of the source notes of the Pentagon papers, if analyzed by KGB experts, could jeopardize a whole range of CIA codes and operations.  So serious were the security breaches that at one point it was thought Ellsberg was a Soviet agent.

 … The Plumbers were engaged in a variety of activities of an entirely justifiable nature. … This break-in was the point at which the Nixon administration, albeit quite unknown to the President, overstepped the bounds of legality.  But at least it could be claimed that the infraction was dictated by national security

 … election-year dirty tricks were common.  Johnson had certainly 'bugged' Republican Party headquarters during the Goldwater campaign

 … However, in the paranoid atmosphere generated by the media's anti-Nixon vendetta, anything served as ammunition to hurl against the 'enemy.'  The Washington Post's editor, Ben Bradlee, was particularly angry, not to say hysterical

 … a series of 'investigative' articles seeking to make the Watergate burglary a major moral issue.

 … The campaign might have had no impact but the Post was lucky.  A publicity-hungry judge, John Sirica, known as 'Maximum John' from the severity of his sentences — and not a judge under any other circumstances likely to enjoy the approval of the liberal media — gave the burglars, when they came before him, provisional life-sentences to force them to provide evidence against members of the administration.

 … sadly typical of the judicial vendetta by means of which members of the Nixon administration were hounded and convicted of various offenses, chiefly obstructing justice — a notoriously easy charge to press home, granted a prejudiced judge.  In some cases the accused had no alternative but to plea-bargain, pleading guilty to lesser offenses, in order to avoid the financial ruin of an expensive defense.  Some of the sentences bore no conceivable relation to the gravity, or non-gravity, of the original offenses.

Thus the Watergate scandal 'broke,' and allowed the machinery of Congressional investigation, where of course the Democrats enjoyed majority control, to make a frontal assault on the 'Imperial Presidency.'

 … the witch hunters

 … These transcribed tapes, which the courts and Congressional investigators insisted Nixon hand over, were used to mount a putative impeachment of the President.  The witchhunt in the Senate was led by Sam Ervin, the man who had successfully covered up LBJ's crimes in the Bobby Baker affair, a shrewd and resourceful operator who concealed his acuteness and partisanship under a cloud of Southern wisecracking

(Haldeman had been driven into resignation by the witchhunters)

 … feeding all the damaging material they could muster to an eager anti-Nixon media … It became difficult for the President to handle an international crisis.  On October 6, 1973 a treacherous attack was launched on Israel, without warning, by Egypt and Syria, which had picked Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, for this Pearl-Harbor-type strike.  Both the CIA and Israel's secret intelligence service, Mossad, were caught napping, and the results were devastating.  The Israelis lost a fifth of their air force and a third of their tanks in four days, and it became necessary to resupply them.  The American media did not let up in its hunt for Nixon's scalp, but he actually had to deal with the crisis and save Israel from annihilation.  Nixon acted with great courage and decisiveness, cutting through red-tape, military and diplomatic obstructiveness and insisting that Israel be resupplied.

Without the resupply, which transformed Israel's sagging morale, it is likely that the Israeli army would have been destroyed and the entire Israeli nation exterminated.  Indeed it is probable that this is precisely what would have happened, had Nixon already been driven from his post at this stage.  As it was, he was still around to save Israel.  In many ways, October 1973, his last major international achievement, was his finest hour.

 … With darker times coming, the pressures on Nixon increased, and he strove desperately to combine two objects:  to preserve his presidency and to do what was in the national interest.

 … while Nixon was struggling to save Israel, he had been fanged by the man he called 'the viper we planted in our bosom,' Archibald Cox, special prosecutor charged with the Watergate inquiry

 …  It was at this point that hysteria usually associated with American witchhunts took over, and all reason, balance, and consideration for the national interest was abandoned.  It was an ugly moment in America's story and on which future historians      …    are likely to judge a dark hour in the history of a republic which prides itself in its love of order and its patient submissions to the rule of law

Incidentally, note that this blog has previously used Paul Johnson's monumental History of the American People to point out parallels between modern-day politics and elections in the 1960s and the 1970s:

• Evidence of Fraud in 2008 Election? (A Surprising Number of Parallels with JFK's 1960 Campaign)
• In 1976, a Democrat politician with very little experience "transcended" politics as usual and was lifted on waves of good will to the White House.

Let us end with a five-year-old post: in I knew Richard Nixon, Richard Nixon was a friend of mine, and you, Barack are no Richard Nixon (thanks to Instapundit), Bill Kristol hits, deliberately or otherwise, on the reasons why America's 37th president was so hated:

Will no one stand up for Richard Nixon? Richard Nixon was a combat veteran, a staunch and brave anti-Communist, a man who took on the liberal establishment and at times his own party's as well, a leader who often thought for himself and had the courage of his convictions, a president who assembled a first-rate Cabinet and one who—while flawed both in character and in policy judgment—usually tried to confront the real problems and deal with challenges of his times.

(As it happens, the former Weekly Standard [RIP] editor's NeverTrump attitude is all the more startling when you realize that Bill Kristol obviously seems to know all about the demonization and the hounding of a Republican president.)

Update: The press turned a blind eye to the corruption of JFK and LBJ, then raced to overturn the election of a man they despised by Andrew Klavan (thanks to Ed Driscoll):

That changes what Watergate means. That transforms it from a heroic crusade into a political hit job, Democrat hackery masquerading as nobility. The press turned a blind eye to the corruption of JFK and LBJ, then raced to overturn the election of a man they despised — despised in part because he battled the Communism many of them had espoused.

 … Journalism today is a corrupt shadow of even its biased former self. Competition, cutbacks and desperate attempts to appease a dwindling audience have turned former newspapers like the New York Times into little better than college rags run by starry-eyed leftist children and answerable to an audience that demands to have their prejudices confirmed.

As a result, the reportage on the Donald Trump administration has been a two and a half year hit job. The constant, breathless reporting of the incipient end of the administration — this is a tipping point, the walls are closing in, the president will be impeached! — has been nothing but the out-loud infantile fantasies of under-read underage make-believe radicals who are not equipped to do the job they are paid to do.

Update: What Trump learned from Watergate by Don Surber (thanks to Ed Driscoll):

The [Watergate] archives have revealed that Nixon was railroaded.

In American Spectator, [Geoff] Shepard wrote,

"There is documented proof of a series of secret meetings between Chief Judge John Sirica and Watergate prosecutors. I don’t know which is the bigger surprise: that they were secretly meeting to resolve issues in advance of trial or that they were documenting their agreements in memos to their files."

 … Archibald Cox in retrospect made Jimmy the Weasel Comey look honest.

The deep state won.

Shepard wrote,

"It should have come as no surprise that Cox delegated the Watergate Special Prosecution Force recruiting to James Vorenberg, a fellow law professor who had taught criminal law. Vorenberg hired only people whom he knew or who were recommended by people he knew, and he assembled a specially selected team of some 70 lawyers, virtually all Ivy League graduates, the top 17 of whom had worked together in the Kennedy/Johnson Department of Justice. Readers should note the constitutional inversion here: these were the very people voted out of office with Nixon’s 1968 election, now in control of the government’s investigative and prosecutorial powers. Vorenberg announced at their first press conference in June 1973 their intent to investigate each and every allegation of wrongdoing by the Nixon administration since it had assumed office some five years prior."

Sound familiar?

That is why this will not happen again, or at least not to President Donald John Trump. He learned the lesson of Watergate.

We said of Sarah Palin, we cannot spare her; she fights. Donald Trump does not simply fight; he wins.

He was in his 20s when he beat the deep state the first time. Nixon's HUD sued him in its administrative court, hoping to coerce an admission of guilt. Trump's lawyer -- the commie-beating Roy Cohn -- advised him to take HUD to real court. 2 years later, the charges were dropped.

 … President Trump learned from President Nixon's mishandling of the press.

 … after a year of propaganda by the media and Democrats, the public fell for the Democrat lies. Kennedy somehow became the victim. And he never had to give up drunk driving. Always bear in mind, the Germans were the best-educated people in the world when they fell for Nazism.

 … President Trump learned from Nixon's firing of Cox, which created a backlash. He kept Mueller, which avoided an obstruction of justice claim.

The president has needled and ridiculed the hapless Democrats, but he also has given them everything they asked for. When they objected to his July 25 phone call to Ukraine, President Trump released the transcript. There will be no nonsense about the cover-up being worse than the crime on his watch.

That transcript should have ended the controversy, but Adam Schiff is insane, Jerry Nadler is a fool, and the press is corrupt. Down the rabbit hole of impeachment they dove.

Public sentiment, the law, and the facts are in President Donald John Trump's favor. He learned from Nixon. it is not paranoia when they really are out to kill you.

What sparked the explosion of "les déplorables" in flyover France was an ever-growing skein of nanny-state regulations

Paris … hunkered down for the latest Yellow Saturday,the fourth in a row that has brought tens of thousands of yellow-jacketed protesters — the gilets jaunes — into the streets.

Thus reports Anne-Elisabeth Moutet from Paris in the New York Post.
(See also How Fake News Has Misrepresented the Yellow Vest Revolt in France and
BLOGGER IN PARIS IN THE MIDST OF TEAR GAS CANISTERS RAINING DOWN ON THE CROWDS (video))

Many come from the provinces, where President Emmanuel Macron’s gas tax would hit hardest. But their ranks also include growing numbers of violent activists from both political extremes — think antifa side-by-side with Charlottesville white supremacists. They [all converged] on the City of Light to scream at our aloof young leader that they’re mad as hell and not going to take it anymore. Call them les déplorables.

Still, Macron says nothing. Instead, he sent out Prime Minister Édouard Philippe to promise technical measures that satisfy no one. The disintegration of Macron, once the president the world supposedly envied, is perhaps the most amazing part of this current flyover-France revolt.

He ticked all the boxes. He wanted more integration in the European Union. He’d fight populists at home and abroad. He’d put France back to work after three decades of 10 percent unemployment. He’d welcome more refugees. He’d save the planet!

Macron lectured President Trump, in good English, before Congress last spring. Save the Iran deal, he enjoined, and the Paris accord on climate. Concrete results? There were none, but the speech was broadcast live on all French news channels.

More recently, Macron pledged to sign an open-borders UN pact on world migration, which the US, Australia, Israel and a handful of European nations reject. He said France’s cherished secularist 1905 laws should be revised, largely to help the country’s newest religion, Islam, integrate within French society. Worst of all: Members of his party have indicated that Macron is willing to give up France’s UN Security Council seat to the European Union.

None of these decisions please anyone in the country, save the clone-like Macronista hipsters in Paris and a few large cities. They are men and women in their 30s and 40s — affluent, well-educated, in competitive jobs, able to afford the crazy rents in places like Paris, Bordeaux or Lyon.

Safe in gentrified neighborhoods, they welcome “diversity” and see themselves as morally superior. They welcomed a president in their own image, especially as he faced the National Front’s Marine Le Pen, the perfect foil, in last year’s election.

A new face, the people mistook Macron for a new broom: After all, he kicked out all the old, tired incumbents, left and right. Voters discounted the fact that he himself is a former top technocrat, bred in the most elite schools in the country. He believes in all the Davos pieties.

It was Macron’s green obsession that eventually sparked the explosion. The gilets jaunes are a grassroots movement, born in hundreds of provincial small towns and villages across the country. They are farmers, small businessmen, truck drivers, waiters, nurses — or jobless. They have no official spokespersons. It was on Facebook that they resolved to adopt as their symbol the yellow, high-visibility jackets that the French are required to keep in their cars in case of accidents.

For years, they have seen their livelihoods threatened — by plant closures, inflation, the disappearance of public services like small train lines, hospitals, schools and local post offices. They need their cars, however old and beat-up, to drive their kids to school, to shop, to find and hold a job.

Their lives are fenced in by an ever-growing skein of nanny-state regulations. Before the fuel tax, there was the unpopular rollback of the speed limit on France’s roads to 80 kilometers (49 miles) per hour from 90 (56). The same week, bureaucrats added dozens of new requirements for vehicles, forcing many cars off the road.

Macron’s government offered drivers a $4,500 bonus to buy electric cars: a Marie-Antoinette moment seen as an insult by les déplorables.

Resisting pressure to cave in, Macron conceded too little, too late … His job is secure; it would take a lot to remove him. But the time for the great reforms he was elected to make now seems past: All that’ll remain, hidden in his Élysée Palace, will be the youngest lame-duck president of the Fifth Republic.

BLOGGER IN PARIS IN THE MIDST OF TEAR GAS CANISTERS RAINING DOWN ON THE CROWDS (video)

 
The webmaster of No Pasarán almost felt he was being deliberately targeted as the tear gas canisters started raining down on the yellow vest protesters around him on the Avenue de Friedland, one of the roads leading up to the Place Charles de Gaulle l'Étoile, already covered not in fog but in tear gas.

Whether it was related or simply a coincidence, the crowds had started chanting "Macron ! Démission| (Macron resign!) when the bombardment started.

As I wrote last week, in How Fake News Has Misrepresented the Yellow Vest Revolt in France:

There is nary a single media report about the Yellow Vest demonstrations in Paris and France that I’ve read or watched that has not been slanted by Fake News.

It has (usually) not been deliberate, I gather, and nobody has said anything factually wrong; what is the problem is the fact that (very) important stuff has been omitted. (Update: merci au Professeur Glenn Reynolds et aux Petits Animaux Morts.)

It is not wrong to say that the demonstrations were caused by the government's decision to raise gas prices. What is missing is that this is just one of several draconian measures dating back half a year, i.e., ‘tis the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back.

For the past four to five months, the French government has done nothing but double down on bringing more and more gratuitous oppression and more and more unwarranted persecution measures down on the necks the nation's drivers and motorcycle riders.

In fact, the imposition of ever harsher rules has been going on for the past decade and a half or so — whether the government was on the right or on the left …/…

 …/… What has been most irksome for les Français since the turn of the century has been the ubiquitous radars, which, like red-light cameras in the United States, are accused of having (far) more to do with bringing revenue to the state than with road safety.

And just like the arms industry in the Soviet Union, if there was one area of France where the technology was always moving forward, it was the radar business.

Over the years, the radars have become evermore stealthy and insidious. …/… What has happened since shows the Deep State at work in Europe just as much as, if not more than, in North America — and this leftist statism is the kind of news that has been ignored by the mainstream media, in France itself as much as abroad. …/…

WE ARE NOT MILCH COWS!

All of which brings us to 2018. This year, as mentioned, Emmanuel Macron's government has doubled down on the repressive measures.

• On July 1, Prime Minister Édouard Philippe did what no other country in Europe or in the West (or, as far as I  know, on the planet) has done: go against the march of progress and lower the slowness limit (sorry, the speed limit) on secondary (country) roads by 10 km/h, decreasing the limit from 90 km/h (56 mph) to 80 km/h (50 mph).
.
• At about the same time came the contracts that the government decided to write with private corporations, handing the business of the state's (plainclothes) gendarmes over to their company employees, to take over the business of the mobile radars in their shiny new fleets of vehicles. (Meanwhile, other private companies have been getting similar contracts from city governments, meaning wage earners doing mostly nothing but driving up and down the city streets, while a license plate reader decides which cars' owners will be getting automatically-generated fines.)

This is actually the point at which the first protests started. During the summer, the country saw a huge increase in instances of destruction (or incapacitation) of radars on the roadside. Many were defaced with paint, others were set on fire, while still others were simply covered with something like a garbage bag (one man arrested while covering a radar was let free by a judge who decided that since the garbage bag hadn't actually brought any physical harm to the machine in any way, the defendant could not be accused of destroying it).

• More recently, the government added more gratuitous sanctions to the driver’s license point system, which is already far more punitive than that of most European countries, not least neighboring Germany's.

• Finally, with the announcement of the gas prise rise, the French said "Enough is enough." And that was when the entire nation seemed to get together via the internet to mount the Yellow Vest revolt.

Guess What: Don't Democrats such as Beto in Fact Agree — 100%! — with Trump that Central American Countries Are Shitholes?!

As supporters call on Beto O'Rourke to run for president in 2020,

writes Chantal Da Silva in Newsweek (gracias por Instapundit—y tambien por Stephen Green),

the Texas Democrat slammed  Donald Trump administration's handling of the situation at the U.S.-Mexico border.

In a message posted online to Medium on Sunday, O'Rourke called on the U.S. government to handle the situation at the southern border "the right way" after U.S. Border Patrol agents fired teargas at hundreds of Central American migrants who had rushed the U.S.-Mexico border.

"It should tell us something about her home country that a mother is willing to travel 2,000 miles with her 4-month old son to come here," O'Rourke, who lost his Senate bid against Republican incumbent Ted Cruz in the midterm elections, wrote in a message posted online to Medium.

Repeat after me: "It should tell us something about her home country that a mother is willing to travel 2,000 miles with her 4-month old son to come here."

Doesn't Robert Francis O'Rourke, in other words, agree — doesn't he agree 100% — with none other than… Donald Trump?!

When they moan the fate of the migrants and of the refugees, what are all Democrats and all leftists, American or foreign, doing if not essentially agreeing with the sentiment (if not the choice of words) allegedly expressed by Donald Trump — that those countries are (wait for it)… sh*tholes?

If you hold that there is a humanitarian crisis on the border, how can you not agree with Donald Trump, all the while accusing him of manufacturing a crisis?

In fact, what are the very migrants, legal or otherwise, and refugees from Central America and, in Europe, from the Middle East and Africa, saying — with their feet — if it isn't that the places they were born and have been living in are sh*tholes?!

As I write in What Kind of Startling Groups Might Tend to Agree with Trump About "Shithole Countries"?,

What kind of surprising groups might tend to agree with President Donald Trump on calling places like Haiti, El Salvador, and various nations in Africa "shithole countries", not to mention many others?

No, no, you're wrong: the answer is not those revolting racists who belong to the despicable Republican party.

1) The first jaw-dropping answer is (wait for it) the citizens of Haiti, the citizens of El Salvador, and the citizens of various nations in Africa, not to mention the citizens of many others.

 … you would be surprised to hear how many individuals agree if not with the wording itself, certainly with the sentiment behind it.

Indeed, isn't the very fact that so many of these citizens are emigrating to America, or to the West, in the first place a pretty strong sign of what they think, if not in those exact terms, of the regions they were born in?

Wittingly or otherwise, the Texas congressman from El Paso goes on to confirm as much:

"People are leaving violent countries where they fear for their lives," the Democrat wrote. "Without money, they are subsisting on hope for their kids, for themselves, that they can get to safety. After being denied the ability to lawfully petition for asylum for the last 10 days, they are desperate."

O'Rourke said that in the "longer term," the U.S. government must also "work with the people of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador," where many asylum seekers have traveled from over fears of violence and economic and political instability, "to address underlying conditions that are causing them to flee in the first place." 

Check out Beto's words again: "It should tell us something about [a refugee's] home country" [with its] "underlying conditions that are causing them to flee in the first place"; "People are desperate" to get out of the "violent countries where they fear for their lives"…

Translation: I, Beto O'Rourke; we, members of the Democrat Party; we, leftists all over the world, I/we agree with Donald Trump 100% that countries in Latin America are sh*tholes.

• Related: Even liberals know that Haiti, El Salvador, and Africa are “shitholes”; in fact, it seems to be their recurring argument for why we need to prioritize citizens of those nations in our immigration policy (!)

Furthermore:

"Those applicants ultimately granted asylum will then live in the U.S., make us a better country for being here"

If all these migrants are such outstanding citizens, why — why on Earth — would leftists not want them to go home for that very reason, in order to make their nations — their own nations (rather than the USA, which hardly needs those outstanding citizens) — better countries?!

Speaking of which: and to change the subject to gun violence: If los Estados Unidos is such a violent place, shouldn't Latin Americans be staying put?! Indeed, shouldn't the migratory movements be reversed, i.e., shouldn't masses of U.S. citizens be doing their utmost to escape the U.S. and be trying to immigrate, by any ways possible — legally or otherwise — to Mexico, to Honduras, to El Salvador?!

If Beto O'Rourke was president, here's how he would handle migrant caravan https://t.co/Id1rHslM9K pic.twitter.com/CvUBPbYMcr

— Newsweek (@Newsweek) November 26, 2018

How Fake News Has Misrepresented the Yellow Vest Revolt in France

Demonstrating with the Yellow Jackets on the Champs Élysées against la répression du gouvernement. It was quite festive in the beginning; but cats are not partial to tear gas, so when the tear gas grenades started raining around us, the bicycle cats said Enough and we pedaled home.

There is nary a single media report about the Yellow Vest demonstrations in Paris and France that I’ve read or watched that has not been slanted by Fake News.

NOTE: This post will be fully updated, greatly expanded, and, in the process, thoroughly rewritten for an article in the January 2019 issue of the New English Review entitled THE TRUTH ABOUT FRANCE'S YELLOW VESTS.

It has (usually) not been deliberate, I gather, and nobody has said anything factually wrong; what is the problem is the fact that crucial information has been omitted. (Update: merci au Professeur Glenn Reynolds, à Monsieur Pierre le Tech Mec, à Monsieur Francis Turner, et à la Ferme de Marguerite.)

It is not wrong to say that the demonstrations were caused by the government's decision to raise gas prices. What is missing is that this is just one of several draconian measures dating back half a year, i.e., ‘tis the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back.

For the past four to five months, the French government has done nothing but double down on bringing more and more gratuitous oppression and more and more unwarranted persecution measures down on the necks the nation's drivers and motorcycle riders.

In fact, the imposition of ever harsher rules has been going on for the past decade and a half or so — whether the government was on the right or on the left — and that is why the choice of les gilets jaunes (the yellow jackets) by the demonstrators is particularly ironic.

The 2008 law (under the presidency of Nicolas Sarkozy) requiring the presence of high-visibility vests (gilets de haute visibilité) aka security vests (gilets de sécurité) in every vehicle — hardly an unreasonable rule, for sure, as similar ones exist throughout the continent — was just another example of the myriad of evermore-onerous directives for car and motorcycle owners over the past 15 years, and so the government in effect provided the 2018 rebels with their uniforms.

What has been most irksome for les Français since the turn of the century has been the ubiquitous radars, which, like red-light cameras in the United States, are accused of having (far) more to do with bringing revenue to the state than with road safety.

And just like the arms industry in the Soviet Union, if there is one area of France where the technology was/is always moving forward, it is the radar sector.

Call it the radar-industrial complex.

Over the years, the radars have become evermore stealthy and insidious. For instance, radars have gone from contraptions being able to photograph a single car on only one side on the road, in the lane closest to the machine (with a burst of white flash quite jolting to the driver at nighttime), to taking multiple pictures over the entire roadway simultaneously of several vehicles driving in both directions.

The first radars were installed in 2003 under President Jacques Chirac and his interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, and in the beginning, drivers were always warned by a road sign when a radar could be expected ahead (which brought about exactly what allegedly was the desired goal, to get cars to slow down).

What has happened since shows the Deep State at work in Europe just as much as, if not more than, in North America — and this leftist statism is the kind of news that has been ignored by the mainstream media, in France itself as much as abroad.

Eventually — in spite of the insistent promises of then-interior minister Sarkozy — new radars were installed without road signs announcing their presence.

The schemes to make the rules harsher have at times been so far-fetched and outrageous that push-back was inevitable and led to their demise. For instance, the attempt to require all vehicles in the nation to be equipped with a breathalyzer. (Not surprisingly, it emerged that a breathalyzer manufacturer who, naturally, was a close friend of a number of politicians, was behind the bill.)

Recently came the news of mobile radars, as mentioned above, meaning unmarked cars loaded with a radar-installed contraption driven by gendarmes dressed in civilian clothes. (Everywhere, young boys daydream of wearing a shiny uniform and going into action to fight crime; imagine, then, a policeman being asked to remove his uniform and put on his plainclothes to do nothing but passively drive up and down the road or highway in an unmarked car and let the hidden radar do its work, i.e., making him trick his (otherwise honest) fellow citizens who have done nothing but "violate" a rather arbitrary administrative rule, a "speed" (sic) limit that has barely changed, if at all, in almost 50 years).

Meanwhile, crony capitalism has given rise to a side economy, a side economy whose only purpose revolves around the punishment of citizens with cars or motorcycles — not least with blossoming (and very expensive) driving schools for drivers to recoup at least some of the points they have lost on their driver's licenses (again, for violations of a rather arbitrary malum prohibitum rule). If and when they are down to 0 points, they are barred from returning to the schools and they lose the license itself, for a year or more — the licenses of some two million Frenchmen are currently suspended — which leads in turn to job losses for some 80,000 drivers every year, since they can no longer commute.

WE ARE NOT MILCH COWS!

All of which brings us to 2018. This year, as mentioned, Emmanuel Macron's government has doubled down on the repressive measures.

• On July 1, Prime Minister Édouard Philippe did what no other country in Europe or in the West (or, as far as I  know, on the planet) has done: go against the march of progress and lower the slowness limit (sorry, the speed limit) on secondary (country) roads by 10 km/h, decreasing the limit from 90 km/h (56 mph) to 80 km/h (50 mph).
.
• At about the same time came the contracts that the government decided to write with private corporations, handing the business of the state's (plainclothes) gendarmes over to their company employees, to take over the business of the mobile radars in their shiny new fleets of vehicles. (Meanwhile, other private companies have been getting similar contracts from city governments, meaning wage earners doing mostly nothing but driving up and down the city streets, while a license plate reader decides which cars' owners will be getting automatically-generated fines.)

This is actually the point at which the first protests started. During the summer, the country saw a huge increase in instances of destruction (or incapacitation) of radars on the roadside. Many were defaced with paint, others were set on fire, while still others were simply covered with something like a garbage bag (one man arrested while covering a radar was let free by a judge who decided that since the garbage bag hadn't actually brought any physical harm to the machine in any way, the defendant could not be accused of destroying it).

• More recently, the government added more gratuitous sanctions to the driver’s license point system, which is already far more punitive than that of most European countries, not least neighboring Germany's.

• Finally, with the announcement of the gas prise rise, the French said "Enough is enough." And that was when the entire nation seemed to get together via the internet to mount the Yellow Vest revolt.

Lire mes articles sur la répression, la persécution, et le matraquage des conducteurs :
https://www.contrepoints.org/author/erik-svane

Il y du Fake News ici — Les médias (francaises et internationales) rapportent que les manifestations sont contre la hausse des prix de l’essence.

Ce n’est pas faux, mais le Fake News, c’est ce qu’on ne dit pas.

En fait, ces hausses ne sont que la goutte qui fait déborder la vase, le dernier exemple de répression, de persécution, et de matraquage depuis 4-5 mois.

• D’abord Édouard Philippe a fait ce qu’aucun gouvernement d’Europe ou de l'Occident (ou de la planète) a fait — baisser la limite de lenteur (pardon, la limite de vitesse)

• Ensuite, il y a eu la multiplication des radars, des radars de plus en plus sournois

En fait, c’est durant l’été, à la suite de ces mesures, que les protestations ont commencé :
Par une hausse impressionnante des instances de destruction des radars sur le bas-côté de la route dans tout l'Hexagone

• Par la suite, le gouvernement a endurci le permis à points, de façon gratuite, avec des punitions grotesques

• Enfin, la hausse des prix de l’essence

Qu’est la démocratie si ce n’est
le pouvoir de dire aux autorités :
Nous ne sommes pas des vaches à lait !